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When most people hear the word "poison" they immediately conjure up bad things in their mind from some weird crime drama that they watch on TV. DNS cache poisoning (or spoofing) is generally considered a bad thing because it means that a domain name is resolved to the "wrong" IP address. It is usually used in terms of an attacker that gains access to a DNS host to deliver the wrong responses to DNS requests or intercepts and alters responses to requests, which then points the client at the wrong IP address.

DNS cache poisoning, however, can be used for a few positive, legitimate things. Let's say you want to relaunch a website on a different web host. To do this, you could develop it locally and then upload the files when you are finished to the new host and switch DNS over and watch it break spectacularly. But if you want to get a relaunch 95% right, you need to see the new website before DNS is switched over. To do this, DNS cache poisoning comes to th…

Occasionally, I run into a piece of software that utilizes an inappropriate license with a crude title. Today I want to talk about one of those licenses. It is called the WTFPL and it is harmful to any software developer that uses it.

I don't use foul language even among impolite company, so I'm not going to copy the license text here. You can read it if you want but it isn't necessary. There are about 300,000 words in the English language at any given time. Of those, about 200 words are considered to be rude, crude, foul, and generally inappropriate to use in most settings. The words a person chooses to use in casual conversation says a lot about them.

Language issues aside, the basic gist of the WTFPL license says that you can do whatever you want with the software that the license is associated with. If you look at a traditional software license (aka EULA) with its many pages of text and the various "license wars" out there, the idea behind the WTFPL …